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Thursday, 10 November 2011

Beavers (Amiga CD32)

I'm going to guess this one's a cute platformer. With weirdly catchy music.

It's nice to find an Amiga game with an actual jump button, instead of using up on the joystick. For some reason it starts with only 'music' selected, but I can switch it to 'music + sound effects'.

Hey look, they're playing along with the music. Somehow I'm doubting that this is going to have anything to do with the actual game.

Oh wait, hang on, maybe it actually had a point after all.

I don't know whether this guy is part of the Rabbits, or just a fan, but he seems pretty pissed off.

Come on man, it said they lost the number one spot, so that means they must have been number one last week right? Either way it's nothing worth getting mad about. The Rabbits are probably still selling records, living the rock star dream.

What's he planning on doing? Going up to the Beavers' lead singer's house and punching him out for being slightly more successful this week?

The guy doesn't even seem that well off for a rock star. These creatures clearly have modern technology and civilisation, but he's living in a leaky cave!

Wow, is that... a rifle?

Damn this is taking a dark turn.

Dazed and bruised, the poor beaver realises that his wife has been kidnapped at gun point. Time for a cute platformer game then!

I'll just go grab that star on the left first before I start making my way right through the level.

Huh... what the fuck? The screen suddenly started scrolling across and I was killed instantly. They put that star there deliberately to lure me to my death!

I guess I'm going right then.

The screen never stops moving right, so I was in a bit of a rush and misjudged my jump. The character controls pretty well but there's just no time to react to anything.

Damn! It wasn't even insta-death water, he just drifted down off screen and presumably drowned.

Wow, that's it? No continues. I lasted maybe 20 seconds in total.

Okay I know what I'm doing this time. I've got to take the highest route, always keep moving, and grab as many stars as I can along the way. It's better to hit a couple of enemies along the way than to pause too long to avoid them, as it seems that collecting enough stars earns me extra hit points.

It's just a shame the star collecting sound effect is so annoying. I'm starting to guess why they were disabled by default.

I can't figure out how to avoid these boxing gloves at all, they seem to spring out just as I'm jumping over the pipe, and I don't have the time to try to trigger them safely.

I tried my spin attack on the glove but it did nothing. It doesn't seem to work on anything actually. I've got a sneaking move too which makes him walk extra slowly, which is an amazingly useless thing to do when the screen never stops scrolling.

Yes! I finally managed to reach the end of this bloody level. The screen has stopped scrolling, and the exit is at last within my grasp!

Oh... fuck. I can get out of this water, I'm sure of it. But hammering the jump button clearly isn't the way to do it because I just got him drowned again. Son of a bitch.

LATER.

I did it! They were even kind enough to give me some extra lives for my trouble.

Oh thank fuck, the screen isn't scrolling on this level! It's turned into a normal platformer.

I guess the poor beaver has given up on trying to chase down his wife's kidnapper and is now trying to follow his trail.

Whoa, if I'd just jumped down that hole without pulling right, I'd have gone straight down that bottomless pit and died. That's a bit mean I reckon.

Well I just fell through the ground to my death.

I'm going to give the developers the benefit of the doubt and assume that's a glitch. Because despite everything else, invisible bottomless pits seem a little too cruel to be deliberate.

I went through a door and picked up a thing! Throwing it made a mushroom appear so I went back and grabbed another one. This could be useful.

I threw the thing and grew a mushroom to use as a step to get out! It's nice when platform game puzzles make sense.

It seems that I have to pick up this hat before it'll let me out of the level. I'm just glad I noticed it from another passageway because hunting it down in this maze would be no fun.

I wonder why when I get hurt, the beaver on the left of the hud is the one that shouts 'urgh' or looks dead, but when I get the hat, it's the beaver on the right that gets to wear it. It just doesn't seem very fair to me.

Wait, why do I have to collect a hat before I can leave anyway? What does that have to do with anything? Does the beaver have a hat obsessed split personality who won't let him go anywhere without headwear? We've got a wife to save here!

Level 3! Can you spot the hidden enemy that jumped out of the background and knocked off a hit point while I walked across? (He's to the top right of that falling star).

Great. I'm a brown character jumping on a moving brown log against a brown wall dodging brown enemies.

Actually it's not so hard to see things when everything's in motion. I just have to be careful with this log, because it moves across a bit each time I jump on it, in the direction that I'm facing. If I jump twice, the thing will disappear off without me.

It moved off without me.

I guess I'll just go leap into the bottomless pit then.

Aww, look at the little cat, trying to kill me with acorns. That's actually a bit of a weird thing for a cat to do now that I think about it. Maybe it's a squirrel.

This is scientifically incorrect for so many reasons.

This isn't as bad as it looks. Sure if I do a proper jump I'll leap off screen and won't be able to see where I'm landing, but I can do smaller jumps too. And if I miss the logs and fall, I'll land on a electricity cable just off screen, so I wouldn't have travel far to get back up.

No, it was actually one of those little rock guys walking across the metal beam that killed me in the end. Little bastard.

Wow, it actually turned out to be a fairly decent game in the end, I really wasn't expecting that. It's definitely not a lost classic, but it's alright. Next game.

2 comments:

Hehe, Brilliant.I'm the coder of this game. That first level annoyed the hell out of me, too. It was originally somewhere around level 12 I think, but an annoying producer moved it to the start towards the end of the project. Oh well.

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